HIDING BEHIND THE SILENCE // A FILM REVIEW OF "BELLE"
BELLE, the emotionally and stirring new Japanese film from writer/director Mamoru Hosoda, is his eighth feature film and one of his best yet. It's a wild retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" but through the modern eye of social media and hiding behind your online avatar. The world of U is the film's online community, a place where each users avatar is based on their individual biometric info. Your avatar is changed but also takes bits of your personality always shine through. Your truest self is what it aims to be without hiding your secret talents, fears or scars (sometimes showing them quite literally).
Suzu is our way in. She's voiced by Kaho Nakamura in the Japanese version and Kylie McNeill in the English dub and both actors showcase a marvelous power in bringing her to life. She's a shy teenager, introverted and seemingly afraid of almost everything. Inside the world of U she becomes Belle, a glamorous singer and overnight sensation. She takes the world of U by storm and inside there, she finds her love of singing again, unable to do so in the real world since the loss of her mother, who died heroically saving another young girl from drowning. She doesn't speak to many people in the real world except her friend Hiro (Lilas Ikuta/Jessica DiCicco) who helps her with her online life and her childhood friend Shinobu (Ryō Narita/Manny Jacinto) who she now may hold a secret crush for. Since losing her mother (which she remembers in some powerful flashbacks) Suzu has been literally silenced, that is until the world of U where she is able to sing out for 5 billion people to hear.
Once there, she also meets a scarred Dragon (Takeru Satoh/Paul Castro Jr.) who the entire world of U is frightened of. He's aggressive and mean but Belle sees something else in him. She sees someone else possibly scarred, just like her and needs to know why his choice of communication is destruction. The self-appointed police force of sorts in U is led by the macho heavy Justin (Toshiyuki Morikawa/Chace Crawford). His way of controlling those who can't be controlled easily is intimidation and doxing them, exposing their real identities to everyone within U. In other words, he's a gem. Her connection to who the Dragon is fuels the story as the parallels to "Beauty and the Beast" and both purposefully obvious, poignant and powerful. The animation is stunning and this is the first English dub I have seen in a while that works nearly as well as the original Japanese version (both versions will be available in theatres this month). Director Hosoda wisely dissects how online life often highlights all of the issues we carry with us in the real world (justice that's really self-righteousness, mob mentality, cruelness, jealousy) and simply carries them over. It's not necessarily a better world once we're hiding behind an avatar. In many ways, it makes it all the easier to become cruel and even more sinister. But it also can give you a voice that you might not be able to reach quite yet. BELLE is a gorgeous film and both versions of it are well worth spending a little over two hours with.
GRADE: A
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Mamoru Hosoda FEATURING THE VOICE TALENTS OF: Kaho Nakamura/Kylie McNeill, Takeru Satoh/Paul Castro Jr., Kōji Yakusho/Ben Lepley, Lilas Ikuta/Jessica DiCicco, Ryō Narita/Manny Jacinto, Shōta Sometani/Brandon Engman, Tina Tamashiro/Hunter Schafer, Toshiyuki Morikawa/Chace Crawford. Now playing in theatres, both in its original Japanese language and an all-new English dubbed version. For more info: BELLE